Chapter 3 - Draven

I discovered the ruin in the silence. 

Not the sort of silence libraries have, or the intentional quiet of Obscura’s more…curated galleries. This was the silence of another kind. Echoless. Like the building had forgotten how to speak. Buried beneath the east wing of the old library complex. Behind a door sealed by dozens of layered illusion wards. Some were barely there, keyed to scent and light. Others were older, more violent, the magic only contained by stone that still remembered the ways it had been used to hurt you for merely touching the wrong brick. 

I passed through them all. 

They were not wards to keep people out. Not really. They were meant to make you forget the door was there. 

But I don’t forget things like that. Not for very long. 

The room on the other side was not large. A single chamber, oval in shape. The ceiling was domed, arching low in the center like the ribs of some long-dead leviathan. There were no windows. No torches. Only the faint violet luminescence of sigils carved into the walls, Umbraen, etched so deep into the rock that they would never fade. The way you could tell what they were not by how they burned like Everley glyphs, but how they pulsed like veins, how they seemed to suck in the light, draw it toward them, feed on it like a memory. 

The floor was unmarked stone, but even before I stepped inside, I could feel it waiting for me. 

It always did. 

I took a step, and the chill struck me like a blade. 

Not the wind. Not the weather. History. 

The sort that presses on your bones, that reminds you you don’t belong. That this place was not made for visitors. It was made for makers. For the architects of war. For the monsters that hid behind delicate hands and had much sharper intentions. 

I’d been here before. 

Or somewhere very like it. 

The sigils on the walls flared as my boots touched the central ring. My body reeled, the world tipping, unsteady as something cracked open behind my eyes. Not a thought. Not an image. A trigger, and my fingers jerked, the pads of my palms bleeding without breaking the skin, shadow-magic bleeding through my surface like ink through cracked glass. 

It slid down my wrists in rivulets, weaving across the stone in elegant, sure lines. The moment it touched the glyphs, the room inhaled. 

And I remembered. 

Not one thing. Not a scene so much as a cascade. 

Pain. Ritual. The scream of bone as it was reshaped to hold the dragonsteel marrow. The taste of copper and ash and blood-splicing. A voice, my own, maybe, choking on the orders I didn’t want to give. And the cool satisfaction of the one behind the glass, the nod when my body spasmed on the altar. 

“You will not be a soldier. You will be the end of legacies.” 

A voice. 

Not my handler. Older. Deeper. Maker, not user. 

The sigils on the wall flickered, and I fell to my knees, the memory washing out of me just as fast as it had arrived. My head pounded. My tongue tasted like soot and fury. Blood had puddled beneath my hands, shadow-thick and slow to fade. 

They had brought me here once. 

And what had happened to me in this room had never really left. 

They hadn’t just made a weapon. 

They had tried to delete the part of me that remembered how it was made. 

The bleed didn’t stop. 

It slid from my palms in slow, steady ribbons, thick with memory and magic I hadn’t summoned. The room had pulled it from me, woken the contingency buried beneath every spell scar and marrow graft. I pressed both hands to the stone floor, but the shaking didn’t stop. My muscles spasmed beneath the surface, tendons twitching like puppet strings caught in the wind. It was starting again. 

Not just a memory. A reconstruction. 

The room wanted me to remember everything. 

I slammed my eyes shut, but it didn’t matter. The ruin wasn’t showing me visuals. It was dragging me backward through sensation, pulling me apart layer by layer until I remembered how they built me. 

The first was the pain of containment, the Thornveil wards. Dozens of them, etched along my spine and fused into my nerves before I even had language to resist. They taught me obedience before I knew my own name. They lit up every time I strayed from protocol, every time I hesitated, every time I thought about saying no. I learned to flinch before the pain came, to get ahead of it. They called it training. 

Then came the beast-splicing, Draxmere methods, feral and surgical. I remembered being strapped down, bones breaking and reshaping under the influence of injected rage. Claws I hadn’t earned. Strength I didn’t want. I came out of that phase biting through steel, covered in blood I didn’t recognize, unsure if it had been mine or someone else’s. I couldn’t ask. I wasn’t allowed to speak yet. 

Shadowmire rituals followed. Quiet. Cruel. Not about pain, about control. They taught me silence. Death without violence. How to suppress my heartbeat until I couldn’t hear it at all. How to wear another man’s aura like a coat. They stitched a deathmask spell into my sternum, so if I ever fell in the field, I’d rot before anyone could study me. I wasn’t meant to leave a legacy. I was meant to leave nothing. 

And then, when I had survived what should’ve broken me, they gave me the final ingredient. 

Umbraen dragon essence. 

I hadn’t known what it was then. Just another injection. Another trial. But I felt it. The moment it entered my bloodstream, the rest of me screamed. Not just in pain, in resistance. The dragon magic didn’t want to be part of me. It fought the wards, burned through the Shadowmire ink, howled against the Draxmere grafts. 

And then it lost. 

Because they had already built the cage too strongly. All that power had nowhere to go. So it sank. Deep. Into my marrow. Into the architecture of who I was. Not as a gift. As a contingency. If I failed, if I fractured, the essence would destabilize me from the inside out. No explosion. No spectacle. Just quiet, destruction. 

It was never about making me stronger. 

It was about making sure I couldn’t be stolen. 

They hadn’t created me to survive. 

They created me to be disposable. 

And now, here I was, still alive, bleeding on their stone, haunted by echoes of blue fire and distant screams, without a single one of them left to pull the trigger. 

The memory didn’t end with fire. 

It ended with a face. 

Not one I recognized. Not one they’d ever shown me in the sanctioned recollection feeds or the conditioning mirages they called “rest cycles.” This face wasn’t filtered through fear or laced with pain. It hovered just beyond the edge of the rune flare, half-shrouded in the violet wash of Umbraen sigils, watching me as the dragon essence settled into my bones. 

A woman. 

Tall. Pale. Not Interregnum field staff, too poised. She wore academic robes, not combat gear. Her hair was pinned up in the old Aetherwind style, threaded with gleaming silver charms. The kind that tracked influence in research courts. Her eyes glowed faintly violet, the mark of someone who’d been around Umbraen magic long enough for it to recognize her back. 

She was smiling. 

Not gently. Not cruelly. But like someone who had just changed the answer to a question no one else realized had been asked. 

I tried to focus on her features, but the memory wavered. Too much damage in the layering. Too many failsafes meant to keep me from pulling this exact moment into consciousness. My modified system tried to push me back into the present, flashing danger warnings behind my eyes, lighting up old protocol runes that hadn’t fired since deployment. 

I overrode them. 

Forced the memory to hold. 

And caught one final detail. 

She wasn’t alone. 

Someone stood behind her. Only a silhouette. Hooded. Unreadable. They handed her a sealed relic core, an old Thornveil construct, humming with containment magic. She slotted it into a vault behind my head as I lay on the table, too weak to move. Too broken to scream. 

Then she said it. 

“He’s not theirs anymore.” 

My body jerked. The ruin’s sigils pulsed like a heartbeat under my palms. 

He’s not theirs anymore. 

Not theirs. Not Interregnum. Not Umbraen. Not Shadowmire, Draxmere, or Thornveil. 

Mine. 

Someone had tampered with my final protocol. 

I was never supposed to remember that part. The override had buried it under pain responses, cloaked it in false failure triggers, and buried it beneath a thousand simulated missions and correction sequences. 

But now it was free. 

I dragged myself up against the nearest wall, breathing hard, pulse pounding in my ears like war drums. The shadows had stopped bleeding. My blood had turned cold again. 

This wasn’t just about abandonment. 

Someone had interfered with my creation. Quietly. Deliberately. Without the Interregnum’s knowledge. And they hadn’t left a trace, only a memory locked in a ruin no one was supposed to find. 

Not a handler. Not a scientist. 

Someone older. Smarter. Hidden. 

Someone who might still be active. 

At Obscura. 

The idea lodged in my chest like a second heartbeat. If she were here, if they were here, then the Interregnum had never had full control of me. 

And that meant the war I thought I’d fought for them? 

Might’ve always been someone else’s game. 

One I was never meant to win. To survive long enough to ask the wrong question. 

The aftershock hit like a curse. 

One second, I was kneeling in the residue of memory, breath ragged but steady. The next, my limbs locked, my vision fractured into jagged lines, and my internal systems began to misfire in cascading waves. The ruin had done more than wake the memory. It had cracked open something I wasn’t supposed to survive. 

Old code, something buried beneath the Umbraen layer, was trying to assert control. Reassert purpose. My ribs seized, and every rune etched along my spine lit up at once, not in sequence, but in chaos. A magic snarl. I gritted my teeth, biting down until blood filled my mouth, trying to ride out the surge before it triggered the full shutdown. 

If I lost control here, I’d never crawl out of this hole alive. 

I focused on the override glyph burned into the base of my skull, one of the only manual locks left intact after the handler bond was severed. My fingers were shaking, but I pressed them to the trigger point. Hard. The rune hissed beneath my touch, responding not to strength but to will. I fed it everything I had. Pain. Defiance. The simple, quiet refusal to die down here without answers. 

One by one, the overloaded systems began to fold in on themselves. Not healing. Not resetting. 

Sealing. 

I locked away three combat subroutines, two stealth overlays, and the regeneration enhancer tied to my left lung. Anything unstable. Anything that might rupture again under stress. The cost was immediate. My breath shortened. My vision dimmed. 

I’d made myself weaker. 

Not harmless. Never that. 

But the balance had shifted. 

I leaned back against the cold stone, sweat drying on my skin as the last flickers of pain receded. My body was quieter now. Not better. Not stable. But manageable. The manageable that came with jagged edges and slow burn countdowns. 

Still, I’d bought myself time. 

And a new target. 

She was real. The woman in the memory. Not a hallucination. Not a fail-safe hallucination to mask failure. She’d touched my final protocol. Altered something the Interregnum thought it controlled. That made her dangerous. 

It also made her mine. 

I had questions now. Not about missions. Not about morality. 

About identity. 

I wasn’t just broken. I was tampered with. A ghost in the system had hijacked my creation. And if she was here, if she was still walking the halls of Obscura, then the university wasn’t just the battleground anymore. 

It was the origin point. 

And I’d tear it apart brick by brick if I had to, to find out who rewrote me.